Tell 'm like it is, HTC. "HTC is disappointed at Apple's constant attempts at litigations instead of competing fairly in the market," said HTC general counsel Grace Lei in a statement, "HTC strongly denies all infringement claims raised by Apple in the past and present and reiterates our determination and commitment to protect our intellectual property rights."

One of the issues I have with the "obvious" tests, as currently applied, is when things which were non-obvious in the past become obvious in the present.

For example, in an era which predates modern ecommerce, a one click design might very well have been non-obvious in the sense that the whole of ecommerce was in it's infancy and noone thought about it.

Once the infrastructure (online CC processing/consumer dialup/secure web browsers/etc) is in place and online vendors start to crop up, then the one click design really becomes obvious. And not because amazon's patent did such a good job educating everyone, but because it was a natural step in the development of e-commerce.

In the same vein, it's absurd to claim things are novel by combining them in an invention*context matrix. An algorithm/UI element/security feature should not be patentable each time a new type of product is on the market. The product may be novel, but NOT combining it with pre-existing algorithms, that's obvious.

A patent system should not protect obvious solutions to novel problems, even if the solution is inherently novel too.

I still haven't heard anyone give a compelling reason why software should be patentable in the first place.